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The Dodgers and Giants were successful clubs with large, loyal fan bases, but by the mid-1950s both teams found themselves playing in outdated ballparks. The Dodgers’ Ebbets Field had just 32,000 seats, while the Giants struggled to attract fans to the cavernous, run-down Polo Grounds. Neither location had much parking to accommodate their increasingly suburban fan bases.

“People have moved out of the city,” Giants owner Horace Stoneham said in May 1957. “You used to be able—at least over in Brooklyn they could—to go out and get a crowd from within walking distance of the park and fill the stands. You can't do that any more.”

But New York City Park Commissioner Robert Moses opposed this idea and advised O’Malley to build a stadium in Flushing Meadows, Queens. The two spent years negotiating, but were unable to reach a deal.

The National League told O’Malley that he needed a second California team to function as a traveling partner; owners did not want just a single team in California, playing more than a thousand miles away from the nearest teams in St. Louis and Kansas City.

Before the start of the 1957 season, O’Malley met with Stoneham to discuss relocation. Stoneham had his sights set on Minnesota, but O’Malley convinced him to move to San Francisco.

For much of the 1957 season, the owners continued negotiations to keep the teams in New York, but they fell through. The two teams moved in the offseason, leaving the Yankees as New York’s only team for the next five years.

For some Brooklynites, however, Walter O’Malley is the epitome of evil, a man who stole away Brooklyn’s beloved team so he could make more money. An old joke advised that if you were in a room with Hitler, Stalin and O’Malley and holding a gun with two bullets, you should shoot O’Malley twice. New York magazine examines the effect of the Dodgers’ move on Brooklyn and found that the romanticized vision of the Brooklyn Dodgers is more reality than myth.

“He had wanted to build the iconic ballpark in Brooklyn,” says D’Antonio. “Instead, he was maneuvered into the role of baseball's Benedict Arnold. How this occurred is a case study in the power of the most imperious bureaucrat in the history of urban America: Robert Moses.”

The New York Times’ Dave Anderson places the blame for the Dodgers move squarely on O’Malley. He asserts that O’Malley made demands that he knew Moses couldn’t accept so that he could shift blame. “Please remember that Robert Moses didn’t move the Dodgers,” he writes. “Walter O’Malley did.”

The Dodgers and Giants were the fourth and fifth teams to relocated during the 1950s. The first was the Boston Braves successful 1953 move to Milwaukee, which served as an inspiration for Stoneham and fueled his desire to move to the upper Midwest. In 1961, after missing out on the Giants, Minnesota would get its team, when the Washington Senators relocated.

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A few years after the Giants and Dodgers left, New York attorney William Shea announced that a third baseball league, the Continental League, was being created, and one of its teams would be in New York City. The National and American leagues went on to absorb four of the Continental League teams, including the New York Metropolitan Baseball Club, before it even played a game.

The team, known as the Mets, adopted the blue of the Dodgers and the orange of the Giants. They debuted in 1962 and played two seasons in the Polo Grounds before moving to Shea Stadium, their newly constructed ballpark in Flushing Meadows, where Moses wanted O’Malley to build a new stadium for the Dodgers.

In 2001, the Brooklyn Cyclones, a Class A baseball team, became the first professional team in Brooklyn since the Dodgers left. The team has an enormous following and sells out most of its games at MCU Park in Coney Island. “It feels great to go back and see baseball in Brooklyn,” a fan told USA Today. “The Cyclones allow for the people of Brooklyn to fill that old dream. For them, it's a new existence.”